Interviewing Simone - what does inclusivity really look like?

I enjoyed this interview, a lot.

In the nearly seven years of our friendship, Simone and I have spent a lot of time in the same spaces. Trains, hotel rooms, dorms, concert halls - she's alongside me in nearly every significant memory I've got between probably 2014 and 2019.

I was around for some of the stuff I was expecting her to bring up in this interview. Anecdotes she'd shared with me before would come to mind throughout, and I'd find myself eagerly waiting for her to repeat them to me there and then. Sometimes she did; sometimes she didn't, and I'd have to move on to my next question and try not to mention them myself.

At the time, I wasn't thinking about why she would want to be careful about what she shares on the podcast - I just knew we'd had animated conversations about things like this in private, and thought they would make content which was as entertaining as it was educational. But when Simone reached out to me not long after we recorded and asked me to omit some of the things she had ended up saying, I was reminded of why it was important, particularly in a case like this, that I didn't carelessly throw around other people's experiences into the public: she's a professional, and bringing attention to incidents of overt or covert racism could genuinely affect her career.

I was actually a bit ashamed I hadn't thought about it myself. Brands, organisations, and institutions often enjoy the commercial benefits of being inclusive (or atleast perceivably so - more on that on the pod), while penalising the minorities that speak up against their displays of, at best, ignorance, and at worst, bigotry. So while it may feel a little off-brand not to be confrontational on this platform, I don't blame Simone one bit for asking me to censor the names of the establishments we talk about. The reality is that while activism is becoming a fashionable way for those least affected by its biggest issues to bring attention to their social media sites, it isn't as readily accepted when it's coming from the very people with which that activism is supposed to be concerned.

Originally, I hadn't planned on talking about race quite as much as we ended up talking about it. I went into the interview not wanting to reduce all of her astonishing achievement to a discussion about her skin tone. I wanted to elevate her not just as a black person, but as a performer, as a professional. I'm really glad, then, that I followed her lead on the very first question, when she jumps right in to how it felt to be the only black girl studying percussion when she started out: from the start, her race has been directly tied to her professional trajectory, and I wanted to know how that made her feel. I realised it was impossible to celebrate her success without an acknowledgement of how she has overcome the added obstacles of her race and gender throughout her career, so for the rest of the interview, that was the aspect I wanted to highlight.

"How do I know that it wasn’t just because I was black, or because they wanted to tick a box? There’s so many different layers to every success and achievement that wouldn’t be there if I was a white male."

The way we talk about representation may surprise some of you, I think. People like to think of representation in the media as some kind of cure to racism, as if our work is done now that there's a racially ambiguous face on the promo material. But the fact is that the kind of representation we're seeing at the moment is rather like sticking a brown plaster on a system riddled with whiteness. It is an attempt to depict large professional bodies as more diverse than they actually are, damaging movements towards better inclusion and outreach, and it perpetuates the idea that anybody not reaching Simone's levels of success is failing because of some individual fault of their own, and not because there is a network of systems stacked entirely against them. Ultimately, it's an illusion: one which only further suppresses minorities as their lack of opportunity is perceived, in what everyone convinces themselves is a meritocracy, as lack of talent, or lack of skill.

Simone is one of the success stories. This episode certainly is in celebration of that, but it isn't meant to fuel the pretence that the structural barriers impeding her success no longer exist. She may be the face of countless marketing and promotional campaigns, but don't let that fool you - there's a lot left to fix in the industry. If you take one thing away from this episode, I hope it's that progress doesn't always look the way we think it looks, and that we should be thinking critically about who our activism is benefitting. And also how incredible Simone is, obviously.

P.S. There's a few sound easter eggs in this episode. I clocked what was either my dog or Simone's, the jingle of an ice-cream van, and your classic doors opening and shutting a few times. I would apologise for the unprofessionalism but I think they add to the indie/DIY/anti-establishment vibes.